Every year, on the first Thursday of February, the so-called National Prayer Breakfast, the National Prayer Breakfast, is held in Washington DC. A very marked day in which democracy turns to theocracy, with the traditional pious discourse - insofar as a speech can cease to be an unholy thing for its listeners - of the American president on duty, so Reagan or Obama is called. Without exceptions, since the time of Eisenhower. And on everyone's lips the excited God bless America . (A curiosity: Zapatero was the guest speaker in 2010, although in his release it should be noted that his rant had a more secular tone than would have been the taste of that audience). The members of Congress exercise that day of hosts of some 3,500 oligarchs , although behind the organization of the ceremony is The Fellowship Foundation, a Christian brotherhood better known as The Family , which gives title to a documentary miniseries focused on the activities of that sect that aspires to be as powerful as stealthy. (And I write "sect" not only because sect is any religion other than the one we practice, but because, when you don't profess any, you think a sect even the meeting of neighbors in your block). That day, in addition, the ideological boundaries between Republicans and Democrats are diluted and everyone feels twinned by prayer, a somewhat disconcerting, but efficiently arbitral, political factor in a country where God is present even in coins and bills. (And it can be assumed that the numismatic concept of "God" encompasses both that of the Presbyterians and that of the Buddhists, both that of the Baptists and that of the Cherokee ).

Since the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, in his first National Prayer Breakfast as president of the United States, Trump - true to God, but above all true to himself - took advantage of the rostrum to laugh at Schwarzenegger because he had less audience than he did in the TV show in which the former governor and exterminator replaced him as a showman .

What is the main objective of The Family members? Well, simple, but ambitious: to expand the message of Christ among the higher spheres of world power to, bounce, expand it among the plain people.

In a country prone to the proliferation of preachers, the figure of Doug Coe (1928-2017), the spiritual guide of that organization who has always denied being an organization, presents an atypical profile: a man in gentle ways who was able to speak sweetly of both Jesus and Hitler and that he had no empathy in interviewing the most bloodthirsty dictators of Africa, where he set a special effort to spread the Christian teachings. Exactly that: the teachings of Christ, because the Bible was only interested in the New Testament, no doubt because the Old considered fantastic literature. To Coe we owe this advice: "The more invisible your organization is, the more influence it will have." (It is seen that the issue of invisibility attracted him, because he also risked this other maxim: «Everything visible is transitory», which would raise, I do not know, more than a muddled and Byzantine theological debate of the type: «If Jesus Christ is not Visible to most people, regardless of whether it is occasionally presented to the privileged, is it transitory? » ).

The Family may be blamed for something else, but certainly not the moral comforts it offers its followers. There we have the case of Congressman Mark Sanford, who equated with King David to justify in public a conjugal infidelity, media and biblical maneuver that earned him the forgiveness of his co-religionists and that allowed him to stay in the chair of the governor he occupied at the time. Because it's about that: if you recognize your guilt, you're already free of it. And the image of the moment when Trump is welcomed by The Family and anointed as a kind of prophet who, cleansed of his sinful past by the grace of prayer, accepts the task of universalizing the doctrines of Christ and to favor holiness among all the inhabitants of the planet. (Outside the realm of the sacred, it is said that the current US vice president, the devoted Mr. Pence, was an imposition of The Family, as payment for having promoted Trump among the Santurrón electorate).

The Family starts like a docudrama, until its filmmakers realize that the dramatized part is not only quite loose, but also superfluous. It consists of five episodes based on the research carried out by Jeff Sharlet, who walked for a while immersed in that sect. One finishes seeing it and does not know whether to laugh or tremble , although the second option seems the most prudent. Something has Chesterton's fantasy: a secret and invisible conspiracy that, once settled in power, is displayed triumphantly in a mystical breakfast, with pancakes and bacon . To gain strength. And amen.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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